foliage. This Arthur selected for his ambush, its position being such that he could cut off the retreat to the fence of any person who had once got among the melons. Hewing down a hill of corn in the second row from the front, he made a comfortable place for his easy-chair. Amy lingered for a while, enjoying the excitement of the occasion, and they talked in whispers; but finally Arthur sent her in, and as her dress glimmered away down the garden path, he settled himself comfortably for his watch.

In the faint moonlight he could just descry the dark shapes of the melons on the ground in front of him. The crickets were having a high time in the stubble around, and the night air drew sweet autumnal exhalations from the ground; for autumn begins by night a long time before it does by day. The night wind rustled in the corn with a crisp articulateness he had never noticed in daytime, and he felt like an eavesdropper. Then for a while he heard the music of some roving serenaders, down in the village, and grew pensive with the vague reminiscences of golden youth, romance, and the sweet past that nightly music suggests,—vague because apparently they are not reminiscences of the individual but of the race, a part of the consciousness and ideal of humanity. At last the music was succeeded by the baying of a dog in some distant farmyard, and then, ere the ocean of silence had fairly smoothed its surface over that, a horse began to kick violently in a neighboring barn. Some time after, a man chopped some kindlings in a shed a couple of lots off. Gradually, however, the noises ceased like the oft-returning yet steadily falling ebb of the tide, and Arthur experienced how many degrees there are of silence, each more utter than the last, so that the final and absolute degree must be something to which the utmost quiet obtainable on earth is uproar. One by one the lights went out in the houses, till the only ones left were in the windows of the Seminary, visible over the tree-tops a quarter of a mile away.

"The girls keep late hours," thought Arthur. And from that he fell to thinking of Lina Maynard and the careless, almost insolent, grace of her manner, and that indifferent yet penetrating glance of hers. Where did she come from? Probably from California, or the far West; he had heard that the girls out there were of a bolder, more unconventional type than at the East. What a pity she did not fancy Amy!

What was that moving across the melon-patch? He reached for his gun. It was only a cat, though, after all. The slight noise in the corn-patch attracted the animal's attention, and it came across and poked its head into the opening where Arthur sat. As the creature saw him, its start of surprise would have shattered the nervous system of anything but a cat. It stood half thrown back on its haunches, its ears flattened, its eyes glaring in a petrifaction of amazement. Arthur sat motionless as marble, laughing inwardly. For full two minutes the two stared at each other without moving a muscle, and then, without relaxing its tense attitude, the cat by almost imperceptible degrees withdrew one paw and then another, and, thus backing out of the corn-patch, turned around when at a safe distance and slunk away.

A few minutes later a dog, that enthusiast in perfumes, jumped through the fence and trotted across the melon-patch, his nose to the ground, making a collection of evening smells. Arthur expected nothing but that he would scent his neighborhood, find him out, and set up a barking. But, chancing to strike the cat's trail, off went the dog on a full run with nose to the ground.

Such were the varying humors of the night. After the episode of the dog, feeling a little chilly, Arthur enveloped himself in the tattered old overcoat and must have dropped into a nap. Suddenly he awoke. Within ten feet of him, just in the act of stooping over a huge melon, was a woman's figure. He saw the face clearly as she rose. Immortal gods! it was—But I am anticipating.

The discipline at Westville Seminary had been shockingly lax since the long illness of the principal had left the easy-going first assistant teacher at the head of affairs. The girls ran all over the rules,—had private theatricals, suppers, and games of all sorts in their rooms at all hours of day or night. In the course of the evening whose events in another sphere of life have been narrated, several girls called at Lina Maynard's room to notify her of the "spread" at Nell Barber's, No. 49, at eleven o'clock. They found her sitting in a low rocking-chair, with an open letter in her hand and a very pensive, discontented expression of countenance.

"Does he press for an answer, Lina? We 're just in time to advise you," cried Nell Barber.

"Don't say Yes unless his eyes are blue," drawled a brunette.

"Unless they 're black, you mean," sharply amended a bright blonde.

"Make him elope with you," suggested Nell, "It will be such fun to have a real rope-ladder elopement at the Seminary, and we'll all sit up and see it."

"Oh, do, do, Lina!" chorused the others.

But Lina, apparently too much chagrined at something to be in a mood for jests, sat with her eyebrows petulantly contracted, her feet thrust out, and the hand holding the letter hanging by her side, her whole attitude indicating despondence.

"Still pensive! It can't be he's faithless!" exclaimed Nell.

"Faithless to those eyes! I should say not," cried the blonde, whom Lina called her sweetheart, and who claimed to be "engaged" to her according to boarding-school fashion.

"Don't mind him, dear," she went on, throwing herself on the floor, clasping her hands about Lina's knee, and leaning her cheek on it. "You make me so jealous. Have n't you got me, and ain't I enough?"

"Plenty enough, dear," said Lina, stroking her cheek. "This is only from my brother Charley."

"The one at Watertown 'Sem.'?"

"Yes," said Lina; "and oh, girls," she went on, with gloomy energy, "we don't have any good times at all compared with those boys. They do really wicked things, hook apples, and carry off people's gates and signs, and screw up tutors' doors in the night, and have fights with what he calls 'townies,'—I don't know exactly what they are,—and everything. I thought before that we were doing some things too, but we 're not, compared with all that, and I shall be so ashamed when I meet him at home not to have anything to tell except little bits of things."

A depressing pause followed. Lina's disparaging view of achievements in the way of defying the proprieties, of which all the girls had been very proud, cast a profound gloom over the circle. The blonde seemed to voice the common sentiment when she said, resting her chin on Lina's knee, and gazing pensively at the wall:—

"Oh, dear! that comes of being girls. We might as well be good and done with it. We can't be bad so as to amount to anything."

"Good or bad, we must eat," said Nell Barber. "I must go and get the spread ready. I forgot all about it, Lina; but we came in just to invite you. Eleven sharp, remember. Three knocks, a pause, and another, you know. Come, girls."

The brunette followed her, but Lina's little sweetheart remained.

"What have they got?" demanded the former listlessly.

"Oh, Nell has a jar of preserves from home, and I smuggled up a plate of dried beef from tea, and cook let us have some crackers and plates. We tried hard to get a watermelon there was in the pantry, but cook said she did n't dare let us have it. It's for dinner to-morrow."

Lina's eyes suddenly became introspective; then after a moment she rose slowly and stood in her tracks with an expression of deep thought, absent-mindedly took one step, then another, and after a pause a third, finally pulling up before the mirror, into which she stared vacantly for a moment, and then muttered defiantly as she turned away:—

"We 'll see, Master Charley."

"Lina Maynard, what's the matter with you?" cried the blonde, who had watched the pantomime with open mouth